Product Description
100 simple but incredibly useful recipes to take control of your WordPress blog layout, themes, widgets, plug-ins, security, and SEO Take your WordPress blog to the next level with solutions to common WordPress problems that make your blog better, smarter, faster, and more secureEnhance your SEO and make more money online by applying simple hacksFully tested and compatible with WordPress 2.7Part of Packt’s Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized seque… More >>
So I’d dived into wordpress, and had all the basics covered…installation, theme selection, etc. What I didn’t have was the know-how to make the tweaks and changes to turn the basics into something I was happy to have my name on. Ideas were not a problem — just the “how”. I opened this book to a random page and found the solution to one of the 50 little tweaks I had in mind. It wasn’t the easy way out either, as Mr. Author-Guy began by noting that the simplest solution was the worst because it was detrimental to “search engine optimization.” So I took the smarter route that Mr. Author-Guy proposed and learned a lot in the process. One tweak down, 49 to go!
I’d say this is a book for the “intermediate beginner” or “advanced amateur”. If you’ve bought Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read, as I did (and recommend for beginners!), then you could do WAY worse than to make this book #2.
It was *exactly* what I needed.
Rating: 5 / 5
Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.7 Cookbook has been out for while now, but I still thought I’d pick up a copy and give it the once-over. Rather than being a reference guide, Jean-Baptiste Jung’s book is very much like his very own [...] website.
The book is organised into 11 Chapters:
1. Getting Ready to Cook with WordPress
2. Finding and Installing Themes
3. Get the most out of your WordPress Theme
4. Doing anything with Plugins and Widgets
5. Displaying Posts
6. Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs
7. Securing your WordPress Blog
8. SEO Tips and Tricks to Get More Visits
9. Making Money with WordPress
10. Enhancing User Experience
11. Make your Blog stand out
Some of the recipes include integrating twitter on your theme using the Twitter Tools plugin, accessing post data outside the WordPress loop and securing your plugins directory. The recipes are generally between 1 and 4 pages in length, and there is lots of useful information in the book’s 280 or so pages of content, but it’s just the sort of thing that’s freely available on the [...] website and other popular sites such as Smashing Magazine.
If you are after a large collection of recipes in a single package, this is the book for you, but if you’re happy reading WordPress blogs about WordPress such as [...] website, you may feel a little short-changed.
Rating: 3 / 5
I would recommend this book for anyone who already understands what PHP, XTML and CSS is. You don’t have to be skilled in those areas to follow the recipes in this book though. A third of it may cover very basic ground if you’re already a novice but you’re bound to find at least a few very handy ideas in this book that any WordPress project would need. I’d like to see more WordPress Cookbooks.
Rating: 4 / 5